I, too, Am the South

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen,"

Then.

Besides,

They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

-Langston Hughes

In Hillsborough County we are fighting for the removal of a Confederate statue at our courthouse. In the past three months, our Board of County Commissioners has voted to keep the statue in June, to remove it in July, and this past week to remove it on the condition that half of the money be raised privately within 30 days of their vote. We met the challenge - in one day - thanks in large part due to monied donors in the area. So, for the time being, it looks like the statue is coming down. I don't trust our BOCC as far as I can see them, so I won't hold my breath. Also, Save Southern Heritage Florida has announced that they plan to sue the county to block the decision. To my knowledge, no such lawsuit has yet been filed, but while they look for grounds to tell the county what the county can do with the county's property, they have published documents that criticize and contain the personal information, such as phone numbers and addresses, of those who spoke out against the monument during the July BOCC, myself included. This faux-study is riddled with fallacies and inaccuracies because it was not meant to educate; rather, it was meant to demonize and dehumanize us as outside agitators and lawless anarchists in the eyes of their supporters and of people who might still remain neutral. This is a classic tactic of southern white supremacists, perhaps one of the few bits of their heritage they actually know.

While the overwhelming majority of speakers were in favor of removing the statue, the majority of calls in the past few months have been against removal, because the Bastards of the Confederacy have had members call from across the country. But, someone from south Florida who is fighting the same struggle has no stake in the matter? Those of us who spoke against the statue did so because we know the history of the Confederacy and the erection of these statues. The Bastards of the Confederacy's heritage is hate. The illegal secession of the south and the consequent war was not over economics, taxes or states rights, as revisionist historians would have it told. In his Cornerstone Speech, Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it plain:

The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Other primary sources such as the minutes from the Confederacy's congressional meetings and the Articles of Secession from the states themselves confirm slavery as the primary reason for the conflict. But, Jim Bob's daddy knows best.

Furthermore, the Confederate statues that sprinkle the south and even other parts of the country were not erected to commemorate the lives of fallen soldiers. SPLC has published a study showing a bi-modal timeline of Confederate tribute. Tributes to the Confederacy - in the form of schools, monuments at courthouses, and tributes at other sites - spiked twice, after Reconstruction in the beginning of the Jim Crow era, and during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. At the dedication to the statue in Hillsborough County, 'the keynote speaker, State Attorney Herbert Phillips, called black Americans "an ignorant and inferior race.' He said those who help them get jobs in the federal government were 'an enemy of good government and a traitor to the Anglo-Saxon race.'"

This narrative that those who want to remove confederate statues from public property are against or do not know southern heritage increasingly infuriates me. In Save Southern Heritage Florida's Facebook post of the documents, one of the most threatening comments comes from a man who was born in Indiana and went to high school in Hawaii, which we all know is in Kenya. How dare revisionist historians and northern transplants lecture me about our heritage?!

My maternal grandparents were from Mississippi and moved to Flint, MI during the Great Migration. My paternal grandparents were from Virginia. My grandfather was the president of the NAACP chapter in Lynchburg, VA and he and my uncle marched in the 60s. My uncle was one of the first two black students to integrate his high school. When my father attended that school, he was part of a group of students who got the school to change their anthem from one glorifying Old Dixie. My parents met and married in Atlanta, GA. I was born in Tampa and spent the first 21 and a half years of my life in the same house in Pasco County. I was educated at the oldest university in Florida and the number one liberal arts university in the south. Though I've been privileged to visit other parts of this country and other parts of the world, I have never spent more than ten consecutive days outside of the sunshine state. Don't talk to me about southern heritage; I AM THE SOUTH.

I am as southern as chicken fried and cold beer on a Friday night, but they don't talk about my heritage. When Simone Manuel became the first African-American woman to win a gold medal in swimming last summer, one of my white friends asked why it was a big deal. I told him of my father's Facebook post on the subject:

Having grown up in the Jim Crow South, the normal news article concerning an African American and water was that someone had drowned. In Lynchburg, Va. after integration closed the pool that blacks had access to we swam in the filthy Blackwater Creek or died in the James River, while whites learned to swim at the country club. Now we see an African American female win an Olympic Gold medal. Congrats to Simone, perhaps with greater access to facilities this will be the first of many medals for girls who will be inspired by her story.

Again, stories like this don't get told when talking about "southern heritage." Until they do, I will always believe that those who wish to preserve these monument are either ignorant of their history or only wish to preserve white supremacy. Those who are ignorant, we will educate, and those supremacists will lose, because losing is their heritage. They lost the Civil War, they lost the Civil Rights Movement, and they will lose these monuments and tributes as we continue the fight to make America live up to its declaration that all are created equal.